[The saga of neural induction: almost a century of research]

Neural induction is a developmental process that allows cells from the ectoderm (the target tissue) to acquire a neural fate in response to signals coming from a specific adjacent embryonic region, the dorsal mesoderm (the inducing tissue). This process described in 1924 in amphibian embryos has not received a molecular explanation until the mid-1990s. Most of the work on neural induction has been carried out in amphibians. At these times, although the role played by the membrane of the target tissue had been suggested, no definitive work had been performed on the transduction of the neuralizing signal. Between 1990 and 2019 our aim was to decipher this transduction. We have underlined the necessary and sufficient role played by calcium signaling to induce ectoderm cells towards a neural fate from the activation of calcium channels to the direct transcription of early neural genes by calcium.